Product Description

Stretching from the years immediately after World War II to the spy operations of the Clinton administration, the authors present extraordinary revelations about undersea conflict between the US and British submarines and the Soviet fleet in an unseen intelligence war. The authors reveal stories of adventure, ingenuity, courage and disaster beneath the sea. They show how the American Navy sent submarines wired with self-destruct charges into the heart of Soviet seas to tap crucial underwater telephone cables. They unveil evidence that the Navy's own negligence might have been responsible for the loss of the USS Scorpion, a submarine that disappeared, all hands lost, in the 1970s. They disclose details of the bitter war between the CIA and the Navy and how it threatened to sabotage one of America's most important undersea missions. The tell the story of the audacious attempt to steal a Soviet submarine with the help of eccentric billionnaire Howard Hughes, and how it was doomed from the start. The authors also reveal how the Navy used the comforting notion of deep-sea rescue vehicles to hide operations that were more James Bond than Jacques Cousteau.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23457 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 363 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Little is known--and less has been published--about American submarine espionage during the Cold War. These submerged sentinels silently monitored the Soviet Union's harbours, shadowed its subs, watched its missile tests, eavesdropped on its conversations and even retrieved top-secret debris from the bottom of the sea. In an engaging mix of first-rate journalism and historical narrative, Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew and Annette Lawrence Drew describe what went on.

"Most of the stories in Blind Man's Bluff have never been told publicly," they write, "and none have ever been told in this level of detail." Among their revelations is the most complete accounting to date of the 1968 disappearance of the U.S.S. Scorpion; the story of how the Navy located a live hydrogen bomb lost by the Air Force; and a plot by the CIA and Howard Hughes to steal a Soviet sub. The most interesting chapter reveals how an American sub secretly tapped Soviet communications cables beneath the waves. Blind Man's Bluff is a compelling book about the courage, ingenuity and patriotism of America's underwater spies. --John J. Miller, Amazon.com

From the Author
From the Authors of Blind Man's Bluff
"We've spent our careers as investigative reporters, but we realized right away that submarine spying would be a once in a life-time story. Decades of missions have never been disclosed, each one a facinating tale in its own right. It took us over six years to research this book, six years during which we spoke to hundreds of men: submariners, intelligence officers, government officials. The result is a rendering of some of the most daring missions of the Cold War and beyond.

This book is the submariners' story, one they have never been able to tell, one they have kept from their friends, their wives, their children. They have been bound by oath to remain silent heroes. But it is time to tell their tale, time to give credit to the men who risked their lives, gave up dry land, the sun, their families, to prevent a repeat of Pearl Harbor in a nuclear age. It is time the public got a look at this on going contest of Blind Man's Bluff, a secret war that has been waged under the seas for more than four decades.

Customer Reviews

Quite a unique book
Whilst owning a large library of books covering the Cold War period, I cannot recall another volume that covers the espionage role of submarines in such interesting, fascinating detail.

This book uncovers new tales and fleshes out details of other previously encountered stories. The research behind the stories is impressive, as is the level of access the authors seem to have obtained.

This book conveys an objective view of both countries activities during the period and doesn't suffer from the propaganda trap many other works suffer. However, it focuses more on the American escapades, probably due to Soviet secrecy hangovers.

The only slight disappointment is that this book covers a relatively small number of tales. However, this is balanced by the superb detail of each piece.

I can certainly recommend this book.

Better than a techno-thriller
Well researched, a really good historical work and yet so readable it is better than most techno-thrillers. Even if you have little knowledge of, or interest in, submarines this book is a fascinating one. 'Blind Man's Bluff' opens the door on one of the few areas of the Cold War where contact between the superpowers (and the UK) was regular and sometimes physical (radar intrusion and reconnaisance flights being the other). 'The Hunt For Red October' is a great read but this book recounts operations just as incredible and dangerous, the difference being that here they actually happened. A great read.

The story of the subs that helped us win the Cold War
It is hard to overstate the singularity and importance of this book. Blind Man's Bluff, as the subtitle says, truly is The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage. Before the research of writers Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew (with Annette Lawrence Drew) culminated in the publishing of this book, the stories of hundreds of submariners, true heroes one and all, had been shrouded in the secrecy borne of the Cold War. Many men aged and died without ever telling their wives and children what they did during their tours of duty; many family members never knew exactly how and why their loved ones never came home; many survivors have only now learned, thanks to this book, the exact nature of the missions they took part in, having never been privy to that information during their service. According to the authors, many of these men and their families have thanked them in quite emotional terms for finally telling their stories. The submariners of the United States Navy helped win the Cold War, and they deserve the heroic recognition they dutifully earned in service to their country.

This book basically takes the reader through the secret history of submarine intelligence missions over the course of the Cold War years and beyond. Many of these tales prove once again that truth is oftentimes stranger than fiction. Triumph and tragedy abound. The book also serves as a primer of sorts for the history of the Cold War; the interplay between different American administrations, naval chiefs and admirals, larger-than-life sub captains, and brilliant civilian naval administrators immerses you in the full scope of military planning, action, reaction, and sometimes overreaction. The biggest mistakes that were made all seem to fall in the lap of admirals and high-ranking naval officers and administrators, and these mistakes put many lives in danger and caused a number of unnecessary deaths. The dangerous obstinacy of government bureaucracy is a problem we continue to deal with today.

Submarines fulfilled innumerable intelligence-gathering missions during the decades after World War II. Subs infiltrated Russian waters to glean data about Soviet hardware, missile technology, and military behavior patterns; they secretly tailed all manner of Soviet subs across the oceans in order to identify each type of craft by the slightest of sounds and to learn the practices and tendencies of Soviet sub commanders (helping to ensure that the Soviets would be hard pressed to ever launch a massive nuclear first- or second-strike via the sea); they searched for valuable military hardware (both American and Soviet) along the ocean floor; and they brought home some of the most critical intelligence findings imaginable.

Among the more remarkable stories detailed here are the Navy's successful attempts to locate a lost Soviet nuclear sub (which the CIA later attempted - embarrassingly unsuccessfully - to salvage from the bottom of the ocean), the mysterious loss of the US sub Scorpion (along with new information that would seem to finally explain the cause of the tragedy), and the collision of an American sub with one of its Soviet counterparts (just one of a surprising number of such collisions). Perhaps the most fascinating account to be found in Blind Man's Bluff is America's secret tapping of Soviet military cables underneath the sea off Okhotsk and in the Barents Strait. Submarines made a number of undetected trips to the discovered cables, hiding in relatively shallow waters literally just beneath the Soviet navy's very nose for days at a time, to collect and replace recorded tapes that gave Naval Intelligence an unprecedented look at Soviet plans and capabilities as well as crucial insight into the Soviet military psyche itself.

You will meet some incredible heroes and brilliant intellectuals in this book: men such as John Craven, Commander Whitey Mack, Admiral Bobby Inman, and Tommy Cox, a would-be country singer who immortalized the deeds of his fellow submariners (and memorialized those who didn't make it back home) in song. Then there are John A. Walker, Jr. and Ronald W. Pelton, two of the worst traitors in American history. Walker spent eighteen years building a spy ring that turned over an immense number of secrets to the Soviets for less than one million dollars, while Pelton informed the Soviets of the Okhotsk cable tap for a mere $35,000. These men put the lives of hundreds of brave submariners at risk, greatly compromising their nation's security in the process, and will stand forever among the most infamous of American traitors.

If you want to know what peril under the sea can really mean, read the amazing accounts chronicled in Blind Man's Bluff. America's submariners played a crucial role in our nation's defense for decades, but only now are their stories being told. It is a secret history more thrilling than that borne of the imaginations of the best military science fiction writers.